After having a number of other problems getting gentoo running on my Lombard G3 powerbook, I've also encountered this issue.

Originally I was encountering file system corrupting errors when I tried to run /usr/portage/scripts/bootstrap.sh while building my system. I discovered that problem was related to the 2.4.19-r3 kernel being used by the ramdisk on the install ISO.

Remerging util-linux didn't seem to fix the problem. There don't seem to be any helpful messages in the main log either.

I discovered that I was missing my timezone /etc/localtime link but creating this file didn't remedy the situation.

i re-emerged util-linux (contains hwclock). that didnt fix the problem.

but i took at look at my dmesg, and hwclock is now causing this message:

IN from bad port 71 at c00a4800
IN from bad port 71 at c00a47a4
IN from bad port 71 at c00a4800
IN from bad port 71 at c00a52a8
IN from bad port 71 at c00a5308
IN from bad port 71 at c00a47a4
IN from bad port 71 at c00a4800

After having downloaded the latest ISO image, done a complete build from both that, and tried using Gerk's stage2 and stage3 tarballs, I've been unable to get hwclock to work.

I was perusing the kernel documentation on the rtc { Documentation/rtc.txt } and found a program embedded in it which was ment to test and demonstrate using the rtc.

It creates those same [kernel] IN from bad port 71 at xxxxxxx messages, so its a kernel issue it would seem. What version of kernel are you using? I've got benh's 2.4.19-rc1-ben0 currently. Going to experiment with other versions.

I'm curious about this because as far as my previous recollections go, I always used to enable support for RTC in my kernels back in the YDL days.

I suspect that the component that breaks this is the Enhanced RTC Support options thats right under Support for /dev/nvram in the Character devices section, not the Support for /dev/rtc thats under General setup.

Currently compiling the module now and will test in a little.

From everything I've read since this issue came up, you don't support for RTC anyways unless you explicitly know why you need support for it. Basically it just provides a character device interface to the rtc which could be useful for things like time sensitive sampling issues for scientific purposes, or other issues where timing is important and its not reliable to use the system clock. As for mplayer, if the /dev/rtc file didn't exist, it would use the system clock.

Oh BTW - Support for /dev/rtc works, Enhanced RTC does not work, so feel free to enable /dev/rtc, just don't enable the Enhanced option underneath /dev/nvram.